Tribe against tribe: Coulter/Penn watch!

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2011

Coulter and Sean limn the wild things: Ann Coulter has been where the wild things are! On last evening’s Hannity, she described “those people”—the Occupy Wall Street folk. In the process, she raised a new point of complaint—those people did not attend Yale:

COULTER (10/14/11): In addition to the drug dealers, criminals, teenage runaways, there's also the Young Spartacus League here. And I would like to mention, I was speaking at Yale on Tuesday, and I was at their political union...And when I accused the members of the party of the left and Spartacus League, “Hey, why aren't you guys down on Wall Street,” they reacted with absolute contempt.

So I promise you, none of these kids at Occupy Wall Street are coming from places like Yale. They are coming from the most bush-league schools, which is why none of them can even say why they are there.

Very few viewers of Fox went to Yale. It’s amazing that claims like this can be advanced as a put-down.

But by the rules of the tribal war, little that is said has to make sense. It just has to revile the wild things found in the other tribe. Earlier, Coulter had let viewers know that the wild things are even demonic. That’s the title of her latest book, of course:

COULTER: No, it's amazing how these protesters, how these mob protests are precisely following the contours of my book. You know, liberals get upset that I say they are, that these mobs, these liberal mobs are demonic. And yet they themselves are quoting the scene, the first scene in my book, from the Bible. They put up, describing Occupy Wall Street, this weird computer voice saying, “The voice of the people is anonymous for we are legion.” That's what the demonic spirit says to Jesus when he says, “What is your name?”

The wild things are also demonic! Later, in his Great American Panel, Sean discussed the various things he had seen when he imagined the wild things:

HANNITY (10/14/11): You have got people having sex on the street, walking around topless, smoking pot. It's a garbage bin down there.

Poor Sean! He had discussed the same troubling scene with his panel one night before:

HANNITY (10/13/11): We continue now with our Great American panel. I said, one way or another, the Occupy Wall Street thing is going to end. We expect a lot of rain in the next couple of days. It is going to get cold. It is not going to be 70 degrees, 2 in the morning, smoking pot, singing kumbaya, making a mess and having sex in public and being topless.

BERNARD MCGUIRK: I was going to start a movement called "Fight the Funk" to get the stench out of Lower Manhattan. That started a movement on Facebook. You show up with some Lysol and maybe a job application and watch them all take off.

Also on Wednesday, speaking with Candidate Bachmann:

HANNITY (10/12/11): Let's see, you've got people having sex on the sidewalk, walking around topless, doing drugs in the streets. Are we looking at Barack Obama's Democratic Party when we look at these images and we've read these signs?

MICHELE BACHMANN: Well, it looks like it does and I've been reading reports that George Soros has been one of the funders behind this again, who funded Moveon.org and all of these protests organizations. So, this clearly has nothing at all in common with the Tea Party, which was truly a grass roots movement.

Those People are nothing like Us! Tribal tribunes will always insist that the two tribes are totally different.

It’s stunning to see the types of things Fox viewers are being told in these final days. But we’ll have to admit, we squirmed a bit when Piers Morgan played this tape last night, introducing his hour with Sean Penn:

PENN (videotape): You have what I call the "Get the N-word out of the White House party," the Tea Party.

As the hour proceeded, Brother Penn doubled down on his charge:

PENN (10/14/11): I would love to see Barack Obama be Bulworth. I'd love to see what I've always wanted to see, somebody run as a one term president and show, show me that people aren't stupid. They do care about each other. And when he does the right things and takes on the controversies, he's going to win the next election.

And, and there—yet, there's another problem. You have what I call the “Get the N-word out of the White House party," the Tea Party, this kind of sensibility, which is much more of a distraction—

MORGAN: Well, I had Morgan Freeman on, one of your, your movie colleagues. And he was very passionate about that very subject, saying there are elements of the Tea Party who just, as he said, want to get the black man out of the White House. He said it on this show.

PENN: I don't think there's any doubt about it. If you ask a representative of the, of the Tea Party, “OK, Social Security, socialist, get rid of it,” they're going to get very confused.

What the, what they're— At the end of the day, there's a big bubble coming out of their head saying, you know, "Can we just lynch him?"

On Hannity, the panel was laughing about this very thing last night, noting that tea party supporters now favor Cain above everyone else. It's hard to make one of Hannity's panels right. But Our Side is trying hard.

That said, the two tribes can always agree on one point—those other people are very dumb. For ourselves, we'll have to say it's starting to look like Penn didn't go to Yale either.

Our side is topless, They are all racists. In each case, the wild things are very very bad, the tribunes demonically stupid.

12 comments:

Whatever the deep-seated sentiments of your average Tea Party adherent, or of David Koch or Dick Armey, the **policies** promoted by the Tea Party are indisputably racist in effect -- from demands that we militarize our borders in order to to end the alien invasion of America, to clamoring for steeply regressive taxation and an end to government "hand-outs" to poor people (racist code, from time immemorial).

On the other side, it's doubtless true that some OWS protesters would love to legalize marijuana (or end the "war against drugs", if you like), but it's highly unlikely many of them are there to promote sex in the street, going topless or the freedom not to bathe.

In other words, "our" demonizations are at least accurate, with respect to policy -- the typical tea-partier, in "our" stereotypical view, believes that life began 6000 years in the Garden of Eden, that global warming science is a left-wing hoax and that black and brown people are taking over America. Unfair? Maybe so, but much of what the Tea Party advocates is consistent with such underlying beliefs.

Meanwhile, "their" demonizations of "us" are either prejudicial or propagandistic. A pack of dirty hippies, etc. The Hannity right simply won't contest, for example, income inequality. Much better to talk about going topless.

So there's that basic difference. Meanwhile, it would be hard to argue that the Hannity approach has been unsuccessful for the right, but you want the left to forgo propagandistic methods, despite the fact that "our" claims are at least based in policy realities. Odd.

When you come up with alternative program for persuading people, in a corporate-controlled media universe, please let us know what it is.

Well Anonymous, there are two sides to this racism accusation. One might also write, Whatever the deep-seated sentiments of your average liberal, the **policies** promoted by liberals are indisputably racist in effect.

E.g., take the liberal opposition to school choice (at the behest of the teachers unions), which has forced numerous black students to remain in failing schools. In fact, President Obama not only ended DC's experimental vouchers program, he forced students in the midest of that program to go back the schools that weren't working for them. Because these schools are so ineffective, the average black student is 4 years behind grade level.

And, liberal-supported bilingual education has prevented many Latinos form becoming proficient in English.

Or, take the big increase in the minimum wage law. That's great for highly paid workers, because it prevents lower-paid workers competing for the same jobs. But it has driven teenagers out of jobs, especially minority teen-agers. As a result of this policy, black teen-age unemployment is nearly 50%. Not being able to enter the normal employment market will have terrible effects on many of these young people.

Hey David, that would be a great rejoinder, if you had any evidence that privitizing the schools and eliminating the minimum wage increased prosperity.

Of course, there are no such studies, unless they come out of the American Enterprise Institute (the kind that "prove" that lowering tax rates increases revenue). And unfortunately for you, and for the American Enterprise Institute, the empirical data runs in exactly the opposite direction. The most prosperous and comfortable societies on earth have robust public education systems, strong teacher unions and high minimum wages. The least equitable,the poorest and most miserable countries on earth have little or no public education, no teacher unions, and no minimum wage. It runs pretty much on a continuum; there's no ambiguity in that data.

But we're supposed to adopt the miserable country model, because the idea appeals to your prejudices or your fantasies, or might lower your taxes?

Compared to you -- consider the scope of the untested and failed programs you want to impose on nations and societies -- the nanny state in its most extreme form (e.g., Scandinavia), is downright libertarian.

In any case, this is my last troll patrol response. There are doubtless folks who hold your views in good faith, but you don't appear one of them.

Anonymous wrote -- "Of course, there are no such studies, unless they come out of the American Enterprise Institute"

In other words, if a study comes to a conclusion that Anonymous disagrees with, s/he will therefore conclude that this study must be invalid and that the group who did the study is not to be trusted. With an approach like that, Anonymous will never risk having to change her/his mind. :)

Seriously, IMHO blacks, like every other minority group, have advanced pretty much by their own efforts. Oh, the Southern Dems deserve blame for maintaining Jim Crow. And, both parties deserve credit for passing LBJ's equal rights legislation, though LBJ deserves the lion's share.

But, frankly, I don't think either party has done much for blacks since then. Black advancement since LBJ's time is mostly due to the efforts of millions of individual black people IMHO.

Interesting that Ann Coulter claims it is a bad thing that the OccupyWallStreet folks don't attend Yale, while others on the right claim that it is a bad thing that Elizabeth Warren teaches at Harvard. Have they no fixed belief system??

Doesn't the lack of elite Ivy League school students make the demonstrators more like "real americans" and thus more credible? If we should only listen to Ivy Leaguers, doesn't that give Elizabeth Warren more credibility rather than less?

Mark Thompson of XMSirius Left states that people that vote Republican are grossly misinformed, or go along with racism, sexism, and homophobia. His logic is thus. It is a fact that the Republican Party has used race baiting, and various other methods to disenfranchise Black and other minority voters on the assumption that these people will vote for Democrats. One recent effort is the voter ID laws, which are intended to keep poor people away from the polls; again on the assumption they will vote for Democrats. The destruction of ACORN was another example. The “Southern Strategy” is a documented historical fact.

Republican campaigners and PACs have long used anti-gay propaganda as a wedge issue to separate US from THEM, i.e. social liberals from social conservatives. The politicization of DADT and gay marriage are examples of this.

Regardless of your moral opinion of abortion, the laws against abortion, family planning, and even cancer prevention vaccines (and the funding of them), discriminate against women. The politicization of these issues has forced voters into the camp of liberals on one side and conservatives on the other.

These are facts These are political strategies.

Now, this doesn’t prove that Republicans are racists, sexists, or homophobes as individuals or as a group, or even that the campaign managers that devised and implemented these strategies are either, but, as Thompson argues, we are either ignorant of the activities of the party we vote for or we are comfortable with their actions. We see that the right is accusing the Occupy Wall Street crowd as being unwashed, freeloading, fornicating, dope smoking anti-American socialists, and naturally, hapless liberals. Just what Richard Nixon’s hatchet man Spiro Agnew, and a host of others alleged thirty-five odd years ago about the “Peace Creeps”. Now, Fox News claims that the popularity of Herman Cain proves that conservatives are not really racists at all. They only act like racists. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. The French have a saying, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” The French have another saying, “Evil is as evil does.”

1. gravymeister is correct that at a point in the past, Republicans practiced racial politics. In particular, Richard Nixon's "Souithern Strategy" was designed to appeal to white Southerners. However, Republican haven't behaved this way for many decades.

If one blames current Republicans for things done by other Republicans many years ago, then the same standard should apply to Democrats. Dems have a far worse historical record on race than Reps. Democrats supported slavery. Democrats instituted and supported Jim Crow. Democrats in the past resisted integration and murdered civil rights workers. Are today's Dems to be considered racist because of disgusting actions by Dems long ago? Of course not. Nor should today's Reps be held responsible for Nixon's Southers Strategy.

2. A rule promulgated by the Federal Trade Commission requires an ID in order to receive medical care in most cases. So, poor and black people will have to get ID's to get medical care.

Was President Obama's FTC putting out a racist regulation? Of course not. They knew that all Americans can get IDs. People can get IDs to get medical care. The same ID will suffice for voting.

Democatic objection to requiring an ID to vote may be motivated by two possible reasons:

1. Maybe Dems go out of their way to pretend that there's more racism than there really is, especially from Republicans. Maintaining fear of Reps is a way to keep blacks voting for Dems.

2. Folklore has it that dead people vote in Chicago. Maybe Dems steal a lot votes and are afraid that voter ID requirements will cause them to lose that advantage.

Yea, these clown are selling a story line from about 4 decades ago and the only people that watch this crap are white conservative-leaning Baby Boomers.

It's crap and I don't care about it. Same with MSNBC and the liberal crap. It's all propaganda meant to distract and to divide. I just saw how the pre-cogs at Democratic Underground are predicting another Best-Speech-Ever from Obama and how they are warning that the GOP will end Civil Rights for black people! (via Vast Left: http://vastleft.blogspot.com/2011/10/in-kool-kool-kool-of-kool-aid.html)

The next step after deciding that Hannity and Coulter are equal to the liberal MSNBC clowns and the Democratic party is to stop caring about what their propaganda is.

Yeah, the party hacks engage in propaganda. Coulter and Penn blah blah blah.

Obama's policies are just as racist, if not more so, than the Republicans (Ron Paul and some libertarians actually promote less racist policies than Obama and the Democrats).

Barack Obama has expanded U.S. military attacks into Africa more than any president in decades. He started an illegal war in Libya. He's bombing Somalia and sending troops to other countries as well. His policy of expanding the U.S. world war even more is a racist policy because it treats black and brown people as sub human. Do you really think he would have been able to use cluster bombs to destroy a village and kill dozens of children in Yemen if these were white Europeans? No, these war crimes against sub-human Arab and African children were ignored by tribal Democrats (cheered on really, tribal Democrats love blowing brown children to bits if it makes them look "tough"), and if it was Bush that did this these same hypocritical Democrats would be alleging racism. There is nothing more racist than imperial wars against brown people--maybe Democratic partisans like those at DU need to look into Dr. King's speech on the subject rather than using him and Obama as a partisan club. King would be against illegal wars against Africa--as Obama is doing with great urgency--how many tens of thousands have been killed while "progressives" focus on the next silly season?

The Democrats are pissing all over King's legacy by expanding U.S. wars beyond what any bloodthirsty Republican ever did.

Plus, the U.S. has replaced Jim Crow with a war on drugs. This is a racist policy that Obama and the Democrats fully support. Elites like Obama and George Bush snorted cocaine, which was a felony, but they get to go on to be important rich pricks, yet when the typical defendant, a poor black man, does the same thing he and his family and community are smashed to a thousand pieces by the tough-on-crime Democrats. The U.S. imprisons more people than any country on earth, we are one of the few that have the death penalty, and these are racist policies. Obama fully supports this yet Democratic partisans say we have to vote for these racists because the other racists are worse? No, that's not true, and it's not valid even if it were true--both parties are engaging in a racist foreign policy and domestic criminal policy and anyone that is not a racist should support neither party.

No, the Democrats like Obama are probably more racist than even the Republicans. They are certainly more racist than libertarians like Paul. The true danger is the fact they fool so many gullible fans into thinking the Democrats are the non racists simply because their Herman Cain is a more convincing token--only a black man like Obama can trick tribal Democrats into thinking they are they non racists.

If you vote for Obama you are voting for sending black kids to jail and bombing black children overseas. Don't lie to me and pretend you're fighting for racial justice when you are a racist partisan--the worst type of American and all too typical--both parties are filled with these demonic partisans.